A family of necessity

Leah Stewart’s fourth novel, following 2011’s Husband and Wife, opens as 28-year-old Eloise Hempel, newly hired as a history professor at Harvard, receives a phone call from her 11-year-old niece Theo in Cincinnati. Eloise’s sister, Rachel, and her husband have died in a crash while on vacation. Theo and her siblings, Josh, 9, and Claire, 2, had been staying with Francine,...

The space of a missing sister

Santa Fe author Jo-Ann Mapson has written 10 previous novels set in the contemporary West, including Solomon’s Oak (2010), a prequel to her latest engaging, character-driven story.As Finding Casey opens, Glory Vigil and her second husband, Joseph, have recently moved to Santa Fe from California. They are renovating an old Pueblo-style adobe house—and just as the novel opens Glory,...

A winter tale

Minnesota author Peter Geye’s engaging second novel, following 2011’s Safe from the Sea, is also set in northern Minnesota, near the rugged shores of Lake Superior. The plot shifts back and forth in time from the late 1800s to the 1920s, focusing on Thea Eide—who is just 17 in 1895 when she leaves Norway for America to find a better life—and Odd, her son, born a year...

Three extraordinary military women

Shani Boianjiu’s eye-opening and brutally honest debut novel chronicles the abrupt coming-of-age of three young Israeli girls—Yael, Lea and Avishag—who grow up in a small village, attend high school together and are conscripted soon afterward into the Israeli army. In school, their days are spent passing notes in class, waiting impatiently for recess, vying to see who can find...

A mother's great sacrifice

Grace and Mike Covey are living a charmed life in contemporary London—she’s a part-time journalist for a local paper, and he’s a sought-after BBC filmmaker. Their son Adam is enrolled at the posh Sidley House Preparatory School; their daughter Jenny, 17, is working there as a temporary teaching assistant after failing her A-levels, and trying to decide whether to attempt them...

The odd man's guide to moving on

Aaron and Dorothy may have seemed an odd couple to family, neighbors and co-workers. Aaron, crippled in his right arm and leg by a childhood illness and plagued by sporadic stuttering, runs the family vanity publishing business, whose biggest success to date is a series of “Beginner’s” books—The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Monthly Budget or, most...

Shattering stereotypes in Reconstruction-era Alabama

The aftermath of the Civil War—specifically, the Reconstruction era in Alabama—comes to vivid life in Taylor M. Polites’ debut novel, which dispels some of the myths associated with that period of our history.The Rebel Wife opens in 1876 with the gruesome death of Eli Branson, the local mill owner, from what his doctor calls blood fever. Eli had been shunned in the small town...

Treacherous Southern swamps

The seemingly bucolic setting of South Carolina’s Low Country reveals its seamier side in Bret Lott’s latest novel, a follow-up to 1999’s The Hunt Club. Lott continues the story of Huger Dillard, now 27, a college dropout living with his parents, and still clueless as to his calling in life.Lott paints his main character layer by layer, slowly filling in the details of why he...

The mistakes of the fathers

John Burnham Schwartz introduced readers to two Connecticut families inextricably bound by tragedy in his breakout novel Reservation Road (1999). In this sequel, which stands brilliantly on its own, he revisits those characters 12 years later. In the earlier novel, Dwight Arno left the scene of a hit-and-run accident resulting in the death of Josh Learner, a 10-year-old classmate of his son,...

Sweetness and secrets

Ava Dabrowski—eight years out of college and satisfied, if not completely happy, with her well-paying job at a Chicago ad agency—has come to a crossroads. An affair with her boss has “wound down to its inevitable conclusion,” her estranged mother has died and her career has come to a standstill. She still harbors dreams of becoming a novelist, so when Will...